My blood is red. I am not the pallid scholar I so
proudly deemed myself to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the
books. As for De Casseres--if ever I get back to New York, equipped
as I now am, I shall confute him with the same ease that he has
confuted all the schools. Love is the final word. To the rational
man it alone gives the super-rational sanction for living. Like
Bergson in his overhanging heaven of intuition, or like one who has
bathed in Pentecostal fire and seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod
the materialistic dictums of science underfoot, scaled the last peak
of philosophy, and leaped into my heaven, which, after all, is within
myself. The stuff that composes me, that is I, is so made that it
finds its supreme realization in the love of woman. It is the
vindication of being. Yes, and it is the wages of being, the payment
in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh and breath.
And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know
what women are. And I know Margaret for what she is--mere woman; and
yet I know, in the lover's soul of me, that she is somehow different.
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